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What are all those oops for?
Lake Peigneur was swallowed by a whirlpool like in an anime, in a sad drilling that took away entire boats. The salt geologic bubble under the lake can absorb gigantic volumes of water, and a drilling for the exploitation of petrol initiated the hole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur

I forget how cool Lake Baikal is until it shows up randomly and am reminded to go look it up again.
I had never heard of Mponeng Gold Mine. Terrifying.
Did you not scroll over to see the even more massive Kola Superdeep Borehole?
Yes, but there aren't any people in that one.
Explain xkcd has links to the Wikipedia articles for each hole.

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3266:_Holes

Site down?

The Wikipedia page on borehole doesn’t mention Deep Water Horizon at all.

And Wikipedia says this one is over 12,000m deep,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Shaheen_Oil_Field

The >12km number is length, not depth:

> However, in May 2008, a new record for borehole length was established by the extended-reach drilling (ERD) well BD-04A, in the Al Shaheen oil field. It was drilled to 12,289 m (40,318 ft), with a record horizontal reach of 10,902 m (35,768 ft) in only 36 days.

Lake Baikal sediment layer almost as deep as the Mariana Trench:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Baikal#Geography_and_hydr...

[...] and below this lies some 7 km (4.3 mi) of sediment, placing the rift floor some 8–11 km (5.0–6.8 mi) below the surface, the deepest continental rift on Earth.

What's at 12,000 meters deep? What are they afraid of?
There's a documentary about that, in the form of the game 'Motherload'

https://www.crazygames.com/game/motherload

I played that game way back when - I highly recommend it. I might even still have the *.swf on my computer somewhere.
I used to play that at work, I thought it went away when all the other flash games went away.
Nothing of great interest. That's a tiny scratch in the surface of the planet, less than 1% of the radius.

On the other hand although we lack the technology you'd need to destroy the damp rock where we live, we only live on some dry-ish outside surface parts of the rock, and we could trash that part and drive ourselves extinct. "Oops"

They meant why are the two deepest holes, despite being completely unrelated, 99.3% of 12km and 99.5% of 12km. Just an insane coincidence?
Also in both cases economic reasons. BP drilled to reach oil which makes economic sense, but AIUI the Russians wanted to keep drilling but eventually central government wouldn't give them any more money.

But yes, largely a coincidence. I think humans would see the same "pattern" if it were slightly more than 12km. We like patterns, we're the superstitious pigeon experiment but at a ludicrous scale. I would like to think the patterns I've seen point at some underlying more important truth - but the pigeon thought so too.

I ran the numbers on building the Deep Underground Command Center in my backyard at 1k meters, but it just doesn't pencil out when I add three S.H.E.I.L.D. helicarriers and their access tunnel.
Hover text is "If you're thinking 'Wait, a giant crystal cave in Mexico? What's that?' then I'm SO excited for the image search you're about to do."
Haha I definitely googled that, and I was not disappointed
Forget about that, I just learned there’s a salt mine under Detroit!
There's also one under Yerevan, Arnenia. Funnily, the altitude differences in the city are so large that the bottom of the mine is still higher above sea level than the city center.
You cannot convince me that something ridiculous wasn't covered up wrt Deepwater Horizon.
[delayed]
It's funny this came out today! Just at lunch we were googling the highest and lowest capitals of the world. Lowest is Baku in Azerbaijan, at -28m!
Funny that he misspelled one (derinku_y_u, literally meaning deep well), given all the effort that clearly went into it.
Was missing the Iranian nuclear sites and other underground bases in this.

Also, I knew Baikal lake was deep, but not how deep its sediment layer is! That looks like something out of a Lovecraft story...

Man that South African gold mine could have dug a whole lot less if they started at sea level.